30 Best Travel Quotes to Inspire Your Wanderlust

Daydreaming about sandy toes, palm trees, bikinis, crushing waves and margaritas? How about losing yourself in a foreign city where you don’t speak the language, but can communicate with a universally understood smile? Maybe carving your skis through fresh powder on a bluebird day is more your thing.

Whatever type of travel gets you going, there’s no question that exploring the world is the best way to expand your own horizons (and fill your camera roll).   

These are some of our favorite travel quotes that’ll inspire you to book that plane ticket, or simply put you in the #WanderlustWednesday mood.  

Now go pack your bags and make sure your passport is up-to-date—adventure awaits!

1.   "Looking back you won't remember a single day in second period AP Economics, take a step out of the redundancy and create memories that will last forever." — Mantas Zvinas (circa 2015 when he convinced friends to ditch high school for a very memorable beach day)

2.    "Leave little bits of your heart everywhere that you go, making space for the places you see and the people you meet. It will leave your heart forever full in exchange." — Kingsley Delacato

3.    “Adventure is worthwhile.” — Aesop

4.    “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” — Henry David Thoreau

5.    “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

6.    “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” — Neale Donald Walsch

7.    “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” — Jack Kerouac

8.    “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.” — Anaïs Nin

9.    “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

10. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” — Henry Miller

11. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” — Susan Sontag

12. “Not all those who wander are lost.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

13. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

14. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” — Helen Keller

15. “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” — Ray Bradbury

16. “A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.” — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

17. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” — Andre Gide

18. “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” — Mary Anne Radmacher

19. “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.” — Wendell Berry

20. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” — Jawaharial Nehru

21. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” — Lao Tzu

22. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” — Maya Angelou

23. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” — David Mitchell

24. “Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” — Terry Pratchett

25. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” — Anita Desai

26. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust

27. “Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.” — Isabelle Eberhardt

28. “To travel is to live.” — Hans Christian Andersen

29. “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” — Christopher McCandless

30. “A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” — George Moore

A beach bum at heart, Kirsten Robinson is a writer and editor living, working and playing in NYC. You can find her on Instagram @kirstenjoan.